I came up with a topic for my website, but I was not sure where to put it. Should it be a blog post or part of my FAQ? The topic could fit in either place. It is one of those questions that a lot of people would never think to ask but is very important. Since it is an answer it kind of made sense to put it in my FAQ. But then people that have already read my FAQ may never see it. So, in the end, I have decided to put it in both places.
There are so many costs for transitioning. The medication costs. The therapy costs. There can be other medical expenses. Not to mention the cost of a new wardrobe and learning so many new skills.
But at some point, while I was considering all of these costs I asked myself a much more important question, “What is the cost of NOT transitioning?”
That may seem like an odd question to some people. The simple answer would seem to be, no change, no cost. But life just isn’t that simple. Human beings are rather complex and our identity is very complex.
Of course, from one perspective the simple answer is correct. There wouldn’t be any financial cost if I wasn’t changing. That is if I could just go back to my pre-enlightened state. If I could go back in time to before I knew I was trans, then even further to before any of my kids came out, everything could be just as it was for the past few decades.
I would know conversations don’t always flow for me. I would know my childhood was rather miserable. I would know I always feel out of place. But I would not know why, so I could continue as I had just accepting it as my lot in life.
But I don’t have a time machine and I do know I am trans. So the cost could be summed up in one word, stress. I would have the stress of knowing I am lying every time I step out the door and pretend to be a man. I would have stress every time I interacted with someone as such. This stress would be exceptionally bad in overly masculinized situations, which our society has a lot of.
Beyond the stress of pretending to be someone I am not, there would be the stress of not being who I am. I would have to hide my feminine attitude toward many topics. When women are discussing female topics I could not join in, not in the way I want to. I would have to continue to hide my emotions. I would have to continue to hide many other feminine inclinations. In short, I would have to hide me.
It is this pretending to be someone you are not that drives many transgender people to attempt suicide. There was a time early on in my self-discovery that the stress got unbearable. I knew I wasn’t who I have pretended to be, but wasn’t quite sure who I was. At that time I was borderline suicidal. Because of that, I think it is reasonable to believe if I chose to continue to hide who I am that I would have gone past borderline.
In short, what is the price of not transitioning? For me, it would have been the loss of sanity and possibly death.
